One of ICANN’s Governmental Advisory Committee’s ongoing inexplicable obsessions is that the introduction of new top-level domains risks toppling the internet.

One or more GAC members have raised the topic of DNS root zone scalability at pretty much every meeting the GAC has had with ICANN’s board of directors for the last couple of years.

It’s the reason why ICANN has committed to delegate no more than 1,000 new gTLDs – a fairly arbitrarily chosen number – to the root per year.

I’m not entirely sure where the GAC’s concerns originated, but they’ve been dismissed as red herrings on multiple occasions by ICANN and third-party technical experts.

And now ICANN has published yet another report – this one written by its own IANA staff – making the point that the risk to root stability is query volume, not database size.

Here’s the gist:

Having twice as many TLDs does not mean that the average Internet user visits twice as many web pages, or writes twice as many emails. Rather, Internet usage is driven by growth in overall Internet adoption. Having more TLDs available does not directly incur increased usage of the DNS; rather it will exchange a subset of their query load from existing TLDs to new TLDs.